Culture – Page 3 – My Truant Pen

Great Thanksgiving Road Trip

I am a holiday traditionalist, I admit. My Christmas preparations involve a living tree, a medley of meaningful ornaments gathered over several decades and four straight weeks of non-strop Christmas music. I still think of myself as the kind of person who does Thanksgiving with the family and the pies and the sitting around telling stories about how Seattle used to be. There’s only one problem with this bit of identity… yeah. I have done that exactly once in the last, oh, sixteen years? (The year Grey was born I went home for Thanksgiving.)

You see, it’s like this. I don’t have any family in the area, nor does my husband. I don’t really want to travel on Thanksgiving. And I host 30+ people for Thanksgiving dinner a scant 10 days before Turkey Day itself, so I don’t want to make the meal and find people to come eat it because, well, I already did. The other day someone asked my son what we were doing for Thanksgiving and Grey responded, “We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.” Gah! We do! We just do so in a weird way! Now often I have gotten very gracious and lovely invitations to friends’ houses to celebrate. Heck, two years in a row I cadged invitations to one of my college friends’ parents’ houses. So we have suffered no lack of welcome or turkey. But the obligation of Thanksgiving, the feeling that there is a particular thing we have to do, that is entirely lacking.

And if you think about it for a moment, that is tremendously freeing. I have a four day period where there is no where we have be and nothing we have to do. Liberty!

A few weeks ago, one of my Scooby-addled children informed me that he wanted to see “a real live mummy”. This seemed like a reasonable request. At first I considered which museums in Boston might contain said Egyptian relic. Then I thought that the really good mummies were in New York. Except I hate New York. Then I thought that the really great museums are in Washington DC. And you know, I’ve been meaning to go to Washington DC for like five years now.

Then it dawned on me that I have four uncommitted days.

ROAD TRIP!

We left at about 11 am on Thanksgiving morning. I remember in college, when I had no where to go on Thanksgiving and all the placed to eat on campus were closed, I felt very very sorry for myself on Thanksgiving. However, I felt not a lick of remorse as we dined at McDonalds for lunch, or Denny’s for dinner. (What? I’m traveling with 3 and 6 year old boys on Thanksgiving. You think I’m going to stop anyplace that has cloth tablecloths?!?!) There was some nasty and tiring traffic on the Mass Pike, but after that we zooooomed! This was our first extended road trip – our previous adventures having topped out at two or three hours. The boys were complete troopers, and honestly did better than I expected. We came in late, lost and tired to DC at 10 pm that night.

Yesterday was a sublime day, weather wise, here in the District of Columbia. Although my intention had been to hie immediately to the Museum of Natural History (hellooo Mummies and Dinosaurs!) the lure of the Washington Monument was too strong and instead we hied ourselves the length of the Mall, explaining the various wars, conflicts and heroes in mostly age-appropriate ways as we wandered. Then we went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where Thane bounced like a pinball between mummy exhibits. By midafternoon, someone was in desperate need of a nap, and the kids seemed tired too, so we came back and had an all family snooze. Indeed, as I write I am surrounded on all sides by sleeping menfolk. We spent the evening dining with some friends in the area, our kids playing with theirs.

Today the morning was the Museum of Air and Space. It was pretty fun, but Thane is woefully underslept and it is starting to show. Also, he has no respect for barriers/fences/ribbons. Also, he plops down on the ground all the time and declares, “I’m not going to _____”. My cajoling muscles are weary beyond belief. But he was fascinated by the astronauts and costumes, and demanded that he be permitted to wear the moon gear. We all thoroughly enjoyed the planetarium before making good our escape.

Thane and the Astronaut Suit of Great Interest

By the way, since all of you are far more worldly and experienced than I am, you already know this. But were you aware that admission to all Smithsonian Museums is totally free? My Bostonian expectations included $20/head/museum. But with free… well heck. You can go in for 30 minutes and it’s awesome and you can leave and not worry about how much it cost! Parking, on the other hand, is $40 a day….

In half an hour I’ll wake everyone up, and we’ll go to the American Indian Museum. Thane is trying to figure out what his next obsession is. Mummies, astronauts and Native Americans are all strong candidates. Tonight, I think we’ll take the boys to see the Muppet Movie. Tomorrow, we do the 11 hour trip in reverse.

In my worse moments, I wonder what the heck I’m thinking and why didn’t I just stay at home and have the kids watch tv all weekend like a sane parent. But most of the time, I watch the wide-eyed wonder, insightful questions and bouncy kids and think that this was a fantastic idea.

Late September baseball

After a year where no one followed the Red Sox because there was no way we were going anywhere after our start, and then after no one paid much attention because we were locked into the playoffs, we finally have some interesting baseball to watch. Tonight’s game determines how much more. It could be the last if the Red Sox lose and the Rays win, we could have one more guaranteed game if the Rays and Red Sox both win (making gaming night a challenge – one of my fellow gamers is also a Sox fan so we might compromise with like a tv on sound off or something), or we might have at least 3 more games in Round 1 of the playoffs. As I sit here, all of these possibilities unfold across baseball diamonds up and down the East Coast with home runs, errors, fantastic double plays, rain delays and all the things that make baseball a sport to love.

About this time every year I feel the impulse to write a thank you note, a love note, to baseball. For a little over half the year, baseball gives me something to look forward to, something to talk about. I listen at 9 pm on my way to go grocery shopping, and catch up on the score at the deli counter where the radio is always on. Joe and Dave keep me company while I pay bills in the attic, and Don and Jerry crack jokes during blowouts. I snuggle my son and explain all the mysterious numbers on the screen, pretending not to notice it’s after his bedtime. Baseball and coffee are two of the small, durable pleasures that weave a colorful thread into the utilitarian cloth of my life.

And yes, I love baseball enough to compare it to coffee. That’s how serious our romance is.

Tonight it will be all over. Or there will be one more do or die game. Or we will advance. This season we will end with a whimper, or a bang, or triumphal victory. Exhausted men will grind through with passion, obligation, ambition and long practice to ignominy or ecstasy.

No one alive knows which. And that, my friends, is why I love this game.

Buying a life

This time of year is one of my favorite’s mail-wise. As a hangover from an era where I was a near-19th-century level letter writer, I love getting the mail. It is exceedingly rare, however, for the mail to now contain a thick letter full of news. It is surpassingly rare for said thick letter to be from a guy I have a crush on. Ah, the tragedy of a happily married 33 year old! But this time of year does bring something to look forward to. The Christmas catalogs have begun arriving.

While wandering in Ashland this summer, feeling all arty and erudite, I pondered the identity on sale there. Ashland is particularly well suited to my desired persona. Many of the boutiques sold the idea of a tea-drinking, poetry-reading, Shakespeare-literate woman of leisure and humor, who possibly also gardens and cooks in her copious spare time. I’m so into that identity. There as stationery for the bit of me that pretends I still write letters. There were whimsical pieces of art for the aspect of me that has a lovely, decorated home that only needs whimsical pieces of art to be complete. There were books I should read and funky vintage clothes and singing oriental water bowls. I was tempted by historically inspired perfumes (appallingly expensive), hand-crafted pottery (succumbed – I really do use pie plates!), small batch teas and celtic-knotwork embossed leather wallets.

That’s probably the lifestyle sales pitch that most appeals to me – and is why I should not go shopping in Ashland often.

These catalogs sell entirely different lifestyles. For example:

Grandin Road: This is the magazine for the McMansion owner with a very large pool who throws away everything they own annually in order to buy whole new ones. The average Grandin Road customer possesses a second house where they store all the decorations and furniture for the holiday not currently in progress. It remains a mystery how Grandin Road customers have enough money for all their decorations, since completely re-doing their decor every two months in their 22 room mansions is time consuming. Whatever time is not spent redecorating is spent: in the pool, at cocktail/dinner parties with 6 childless friends or making exotic mixed drinks.

What I actually bought there: An inflatable bed for the guest room.

LL Bean: The LL Bean catalog is intended for the independently wealthy outdoorsy type who can spend more money on flannel than I spent on my very best interviewing suit. The average LL Bean customer lives on a lake, spends weekends hiking and never, ever wears anything but solids or stripes. LL Bean customers have two children and a dog. Their children never lose their coats or mittens. LL Bean customers may have a job, but it does not involve anything more fancy than business casual.

What I actually bought there: The most expensive shoes I own

Last year I bought black. This year I'm totally getting brown. They never did go on sale.

Oriental Trading Company: Customers at the Oriental see roughly 50 kids a day, and must fend all of them off with presents. At least 50% of those customers run a Vacation Bible School, or are looking for ways to have a Christian Halloween party. The walls of a Oriental Trading customer are completely plastered with bedazzled art projects featuring foam monkeys, they sell glow-in-the-dark paraphernalia under the table during 4th of July celebrations, and their 12 children are dressed entirely in tie-dye and fabric painted t-shirts.

What I actually bought there: Turns out I’m a Sunday School teacher with kids – aka their target demographic

But I was still only crazy enough to do an all church Easter Egg hunt once.

My final analysis of the day is for a lifestyle sale that I absolutely DO NOT WANT. At the hair salon the other day (I KNOW!) I was flipping through one of those style magazines. UGH. None of the clothes looked like they could be washed. None of the people looked happy. Heck most of the models were downright unattractive. I read an article about a woman who was addicted to chemically peeling her face off regularly and was forced (?!?!) to go cold turkey because she’d damaged it so badly. I’ve made progress in the last decade. I dress not badly. I wear jewelry and makeup on a regular basis. Heck, I go to a hair salon instead of cutting my own locks in the kitchen. But pffft. It stops there, man. I want no part of your designed, druggie, unhappy, how-ugly-can-you-get-and-still-be-pretty, high maintenance, high drama lifestyles!

How about you? Which lifestyle sales speak to who you wish you were? Which ones turn you off? Which do you find downright inexplicable?

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

When I returned to the office after a week’s vacation, in the standard office small talk lots of people asked me where I went. “I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.” For some people I had to explain that the festival is not a weekend-long amateur production. Others needed to be told that Ashland was in the south of the State – near the California border. Still others (in their defense, mostly my non-US colleagues) had to be told where Oregon was. But not a single person had heard of the festival.

This is tragic. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) should be internationally known and lauded. As their “About us” states:

Founded in 1935, the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is among the oldest and largest professional non-profit theatres in the nation. Each year OSF presents an eight-and-a-half-month season of eleven plays in three theatres plus numerous ancillary activities, and undertakes an extensive theatre education program. Operating on a budget exceeding $26 million, OSF presents more than 780 performances annually with attendance of approximately 400,000.

In other words, this is not a rinky-dink theater in the middle of nowhere. This is a theatrical powerhouse nestled between sea and ocean in one of the loveliest small towns I’ve ever seen. In my youth, I went to Ashland most summer’s with my Godfather. I learned an abiding love of Stoppard with Arcadia in 1996. I fell in love with Ted Deasy in “As You Like It” in 1997. I met Bobby McFerrin, barefoot and whistling, on the street the night after watching him rehearse an orchestra at the nearby Britt Festival. I have warm and lovely memories tied up there.

So this summer, when I heard they were doing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance on the open-air Elizabethan stage, I decided that this is where we were going to spend our summer’s leisure. And it was a very, very good choice!

We had tickets originally for four plays, but “rushed” a matinee play on our middle day. This is an excellent plan, if I may opine. Also, that rush play was the very best of our viewing there, leading me to be relieved and delighted we picked it up!

Tuesday – King Henry IV Part II
This was the last of the Henry’s I had not seen. I’m quite fond of Shakespeare’s histories. I liked Henry IV part I and I loved Henry V, so I was glad to see this bridge play between the boy and the man who stood on that French battlefield. But Henry IV Part II is really Full of Falstaff. It must be a difficult play to stage because, in truth, it is not one of Shakespeare’s best. The two concurrent plots seem very far from each other – suppressing the rebellion and Falstaff’s foolings. It seems as though one or the other could easily be edited out without affecting the counterpart. The production was an excellent one. My favorite interpretation element was having one of the characters deaf/mute, who communicated with Hal through this expressive and easily understood sign language. The flicker of hands and the unexpected element of interpretation was a delight to me. Still, the theater was half full and the play faded fast from memory. If you can see only one play at Ashland… not this one. (Although if you are seeing several, it should be on your list!)

Wednesday afternoon – Ghost Light
This was our accidental play. The promo text did not sound promising. Few experience the death of a parent against the backdrop of history. In Taccone’s evocative new play, Jon is a theatre director haunted for years by the assassination of his father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. When asked to stage a production of Hamlet, the ghost of the king stalks the battlement of Jon’s mind and heart, and he is summoned to confront his long buried feelings. Smartly laced with poetry and wit, this world premiere is rooted in a crime that shocked a nation and changed a city—and a young boy—forever.

In fact, it didn’t sound promising at all. But I really really didn’t want to see Measure for Measure and it was half priced so….

People. It was fantastic. The dialogue sparkled. The fourth wall was breached in a most fascinating manner. The boundaries between reality, perception and dream were powerfully crossed and braided. The acting was superb. The characters were people you wanted to know and to sit with. There was one of the best awkward scenes I’ve ever seen acted. (Of course, that it included my long-time heartthrob Ted Deasy was just a bonus.) From first scene to closing, it was superb. I would strongly recommend that should you find yourself passing by Ashland, you stop and see this play.

Wednesday night – Pirates of Penzance
My family has a long, long history with Gilbert and Sullivan, and with Pirates in particular. At about Thane’s age, my brother watched a video version of Pirates (with Kevin Kline, Linda Ronsadt and Angela Lansbury … truly worth seeing some sad night when you need cheering up). But this blessed video was played every single day in my household for over two years. Sometimes twice a day. We can, collectively, sing the whole thing together. I know every line of this operetta.

Ashland was one of the few places I could count upon to improve, not disappoint. And I was not disappointed! The staging was a delight. There was a live orchestra (of course) and the conductor played a visible role in the play. There were periodic lapses into other musical idioms – all amusing – before snapping back to Sullivan’s original-as-written text. Through it all, the cast moved and flew and lunged and trotted (often with the assistance of tuxedo’d, white gloved assistants) across the Elizabethan. The production was full of fun and energy and enthusiasm – as it should be. There were just enough departures to keep me on my toes, but enough time spent on the original that I didn’t feel cheated. Perfect. I would recommend you see it – but good luck getting tickets!

Thursday afternoon – The African Company presents Richard III
I had originally thought this was actually Richard III. But no, it was about a freed black troupe attempting to put on a production of Richard III at the same time as a white company nearby. There were a few promising moments – a few speeches, a few exchanges, a few plot threads… but on the whole it disappointed. The drama of the black/white conflict was diluted. The love-plot seemed abandoned halfway. Instead of a tight interweaving of multiple plot threads, it seemed just disjointed. This was the first week the play was open, so there’s hope that it will somehow tighten. It was also produced in the temporary tent necessitated by the cracking of a structural beam in the Bowmer, so that couldn’t have helped.

Thursday night – Love’s Labours Lost
We closed our theatrical week with a bit of cotton candy. Love’s Labours Lost is one of Shakespeare’s lighter plays, with a group of boys and a group of girls playing with each other’s expectations, well mixed with a troupe of fools wandering through. This production was fun, light and did an excellent job of making the almost entirely verse play easy to follow for modern audiences. It was lovely to look upon and very funny when the text permitted it. It was a wonderful play to disprove the idea that Shakespeare is boring to a young person. It was a lovely way to end our stay.

There were two plays that, having talked with our fellow theater-goers, I really WISH I had been able to see. I was told by a fellow patron that August: Osage County might well be one of the best plays written in the last 100 years. Even putting aside such hyperbole, it came so highly recommended that I was sad I couldn’t fit it into our schedule. We also really wanted to see The Imaginary Invalid, mostly because Moliere is fun.

It was a superb way to spend a week of vacation.

Ruddygore

I have been going to the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan’s Society since I was nine years old. I remember those first trips allll the way in to the city. I remember the dark, fancy restaurant where we ate – my relations boisterous recounting previous years’ productions or scouting escapades. (My grandparents were professional scouters, as were their friends.

Obviously, I have missed many years, what with the “living in Boston” bits. I’ve never seen Pinafore! Heavens! But this year it transpired that we were in Seattle for the annual trip – this year to see Ruddygore.

I am less intimidated by the whole process than I was as a girl. It was at G&S that my family renewed it’s friendship with my Godfather, who, during my high school years took me to see roughly one performance in Seattle once a week. (Yes, for four years.) He took me (and my siblings) to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival, to the Seattle Opera’s Ring Cycle. He had season tickets to four theaters in Seattle, and I accompanied him to them for years.

He was there this year for Ruddigore. But other beloved faces were missing. My Grandmother had continued going even after a surgery gone awry had robbed her of the use of most of her body. My Grandfather presided jovially at the table for several more years, until he also died. Most of my cousins, although local, have not chosen to continue attending. On the other hand, my nephew Baz sat rapt during the operetta, extending the performances to the fourth generation.

Yes, fourth generation. One thing I learned during this year’s dinner is that my family and my godfather have been attending the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan society’s productions FOR 53 YEARS. Since 1958 or ’59.

What an awesome and enduring tradition! Without the previous generation, it can be hard for the siblings to stay together – stay in more contact than Facebook. But this tradition brought all four brothers together once again, with old family friends, to talk about what was, what is, and which G&S operetta is our favorite. (I’m caught between fan favorite Pirates of Penzance and Iolanthe, which is much funnier when seen in conjunction with Wagner’s Ring).

This production of Ruddygore was no disappointment. For a more obscure operetta, it had a goodly number of marquee numbers. The staging and cast were, as always, superb. And best of all were the friends and family!